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The book
was written documentary style as a series of oral interviews of
survivors a decade after the end of the war. The result is a rich
tapestry of people from all over the world, all different lifestyles,
and different stories to tell. Ultimately, this presents a critique on
the flaws of our society and government today, with a vision of how
things could be, even after apocalyptic conditions. For example,
conflict in the Middle East is resolved in light of the greater threat,
the US forgoes its imperialism, and international bureaucracy and
politics are virtually non-existent.

The
movie, on the other hand, is reduced to the narrative of one person:
Gerry Lane, a former UN investigator. The horrors and experiences of an
entire world are condensed in the body of a white, heterosexual, cis
male. We go from having vivid snapshots of individuals from around the
world with names like General Raj-Singh, Dr. Kwang Jinshu, Nury Televaldi, Fernando Oliveira, Saladin Kadar, and Father Sergei Ryzhkov to Thierry Umutoni, Jurgen Warmbrunn (played by a white actor), Segen, and Tommy as the few named characters who are not white.

In the movie, the "least-white" area that our hero visits is South Korea. (Don't even get me started on how the origin of outbreak was moved from China to Russia for fear of offending someone). The other stops on his world tour? Philadelphia, New York, Jerusalem, Cardiff, and Nova Scotia.
So not only are the stories of others written out of the plot, but
evidently so is the entire rest of the non-white, non-US allied world.
Kind of hard to call it World War Z, eh?

What it
really boils down to is that they gutted a wonderful social commentary
in order to create a cookie-cutter action film wank-fest for dude-bros.
The trailers make it rather hard to see the zombies around the
close-ups of Brad Pitt. It's sad that they took zombie culture, really a
criticism of society itself, in order to sterilize, package, and market
it for what Hollywood thought would "best" and least offensive. It's
the undead eating the living. It's meant to be offensive.